Enthusiasts for prohibiting political dissent must know that the First Amendment protects the right to utter controversial speech.
They must know that there’s no constitutional loophole for speech that they disagree with.
Another “must know”? That calling the public statements of political opponents “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech,” etc. is no substitute for open discussion.
They just don’t care.
They just know that if they keep plugging away, struggling to muzzle the badspeech, they’re more likely to get their way than playing by the rules of free speech and open debate.
Their determination is well shown in a new California law, AB587, passed about a year ago. The law compels social media companies to institute moderation policies to squelch “hate speech,” “extremism,” “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “radicalization,” etc.
Although AB587 is anti-transparently called a “transparency measure,” main author Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel admits the point: to force social media companies to “moderate or remove hateful or incendiary content on their platforms,” like “hate speech and disinformation.”
Since Elon Musk’s Twitter is affected by the new law, Musk is suing to block it.
According to his lawsuit, AB587 “compels companies like X Corp. [Twitter] to engage in speech against their will, impermissibly interferes with [their] constitutionally protected editorial judgments” and “has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies . . . to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally protected speech that the State deems undesirable or harmful.”
Politically, Mr. Musk has emerged as one of the country’s most frustratingly contradictory figures, often doing great things, sometimes very bad ones. With this lawsuit, even his enemies must know he is in the right.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Illustration created with PicFinder.ai and DALL-E2
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3 replies on “Must Known Musk”
It is tragic in the extreme that the 45th president abused the First Amendment by inciting a riot. Multiple Courts at every level of our Judiciary all across the country have determined that the 45th president abused his freedom of speech to incite a riot. He also abused his freedom of speech to say things like we should put bleach up our butts to treat covid. Physicians who were present stared at their feet and their heads exploded. So yeah, tragic that he did all that to our freedom of speech. But he did!
Julius, freedom of speech permits you to tell the lies you just told. It does not compel us to believe the lies you told. Trump did not incite a riot. Nor did he tell people to use bleach internally to fight COVID. Your willingness to believe these lies demonstrate your ignorance and lack of discernment.
Can Elon Musk defeat the deep state and the entire leftist establishment? Time will tell.